In this guide you will learn how to control a couple of 110V appliances over Wi-Fi for $9, using Itead’s SONOFF Dual.Compared with consumer-grade WiFi smart plugs in the market, the SONOFF is a great alternative for making smart home and even industrial IoT projects at a larger scale. Moreover, it is based on the popular ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip, making it compatible with the Arduino environment and other resources like our ESP libraries at Ubidots.

Requirements

An UartSBee device to be able to program the SONOFF using your computer

Hardware Setup

Disassemble the SONOFF Dual device, this is to access the SONOFF TTL pinout, which we’ll need to program the onboard ESP8266. The SONOFF comes without two of its pin headers, so you will need to solder them before programming the unit.

After soldering, connect the board to the UartSBee following this table:

UartSBee

SONOFF Dual

VCC

VCC

TX

RX

RX

TX

GND

GND

UartSBEE Pinout

Also, you will need to make a connection between the GND pin of the pin header in the left (the one that contains Button 1 and 0 pins), and the EN_FW pin of the ESP8266 which is shown below:

SONOFF Pinout (front facing)

SONOFF Pinout (backward face)

Arduino IDE Setup

In the Arduino IDE, click on Files -> Preferences and enter this URL into the Additional Boards Manager URLs field, to be able to access ESP8266’s libraries for Arduino:

http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json

This field supports multiple URLs. Separate them with commas in case you already have other URLs typed.

Open the Boards Manager from **Tools -> Board **menu and install ESP8266 platform.

After installation, go to the Tools > Board menu and select the board: Generic ESP8266 Module.

Select the .ZIP file of UbidotsESPMQTT and then click on “Accept” or “Choose”.

Close the Arduino IDE and open it again.

Coding your SONOFF Dual

This sample code will subscribe to a Ubidots variable that turns on or off both relays at the same time.

Before running the code, go to your Ubidots account, locate the “Devices” tab and create a Device called “SONOFF Dual” and a variable in it called “Relays”. It should look like this:

Make sure the Device API label is “sonoff-dual” and the variable API label is “relays”. These are the unique identifiers used by the SONOFF to know to which variable to subscribe in the MQTT broker. You can edit the labels if needed.

You can do more elaborate actions by tinkering with the SONOFF Dual internal commands. Here’s a quick reference we found in their forums:

Serial:
19230,8,N,1
Bytes to be sent to the unit:
0xA0
0x04
0xxx
0xA1
where 0xxx seems to be:
0x00 both off
0x01 relay one on
0x02 relay two on
0x03 both relays on

After flashing your devices, open up the serial monitor of the Arduino IDE, you should see something like this, meaning the WiFi connection and MQTT subscription were successful:

Results

Now go to the “Dashboards” tab and add a new Widget of the type “Control”–> “Switch”:

This switch will send a “1” or a “0” to the “Relays” variable, which is then read in the SONOFF’s callback function to turn the relays on or off. You can now control your SONOFF Dual remotely from your dashboard!

Now it is time to create your own applications and dashboards to control and manage your environments. To learn more about Ubidots widgets and events, check out these video tutorials and sign up for free today!